Page 22 of The Book That Held Her Heart

“You were going to die.” Starval seemed sure of that at least.

Evar raised a trembling arm. He was talking to his body in a new language. With his muscles deaf to his normal instructions, he found himself having to learn Yute’s control over the unformed creation that leaked from the library’s wounds and now filled his own. The Escapes had been monstrous because he had expected them to be. With Livira he had flown because she had taught him to believe that he could. Now he managed to stand through a combination of belief that he should be able to and his body’s ability to meet those demands. He found it to be a strange experience. Very similar to what he had known before, but also not the same.

Feeling a hundred feet tall, but also, to judge by Clovis and Starval, the same height he had always been, he turned to see the full extent of his surroundings. Paper drifts, lakes of dust, a gentle fall of loose pages from infinitely black heavens, distant mysteries that might be anything from mountains to monsters. The only sensible question was:Where are we?

“Where’s Livira?”

“She didn’t come through,” Clovis said.

“Through?”

“The assistant was destroyed. His blood made a portal. Three portals—or pools.” Starval waved the detail away. “We came through one of them. She didn’t follow. The automaton was going to explode or burn. Either way, she’ll have left by one of the other pools.”

“Where’s the door?” Evar glanced around in case he’d missed a sparkling door of light somewhere in the twilit paper wasteland.

Starval made a brief upward gesture. “We fell. Only…slowly…like the pages.”

Evar looked up, already knowing that there was nothing to see. “She would have followed if she’d been able to. Where’s Mayland?”

“Scouting. He says he knows this place,” Clovis said.

“And where are we?”

“At last.” Starval grinned. “That would have been my first question.”

Clovis glanced around doubtfully. “He says we’re in the vaults. Below the library. An infinitely deep shaft below each chamber, the same width and breadth as the chamber.”

“But how—”

“Don’t ask.” Starval shrugged. “All he’s saying is it doesn’t matter how far you climbed up or how far you dug down, you’re not finding a ceiling or a floor. And the pages—anything that’s destroyed up above, consumed by fire, eaten by hungry readers, devoured by book-mites…it all comes fluttering down here. It’s like an underworld for books.”

“And we just wait here, do we?” Evar turned, moving with slowly growing confidence.

“We were watching overyou!” Clovis said, her face unreadable.

“I’m going to find Livira.” Evar chose a direction and started walking, keeping things slow on the unfamiliar footing.

“I’d like to find Arpix,” Clovis said. “But just wandering off and getting lost isn’t going to help. Mayland says—”

“Mayland murdered Yute’s wife in front of us!” Evar spun round. “He wants to destroy the library!”

“And?” Clovis shrugged. “I liked it outside better. The library stole our lives. It’s a wonder we survived without murdering each other.”

“The library didn’t do this to us. Our own people did. And the humans, and probably the ganar and the skeer and other creatures we don’t evenknow the names for yet. The library caught fire when canith were attacking humans. And yes, they probably had their reasons. But the fact is that the library didn’t do anything to us. It was just there. And it was misused.” Evar looked at his brother for backup.

Starval echoed Clovis’s shrug. “One of the many ways I know to kill people is to take something that you know will attract them, make it lethal, and leave it where they will find it. For example, a juicy red apple, into which poison has been injected. You might say that neither the apple nor the poison meant you any harm. You just misused them both when you took that bite. But still, you would wish that someone had found it first and destroyed it. And you would agree that leaving it for you to find was in no way an act of kindness.”

It seemed to Evar that Mayland’s voice was coming out of Starval’s mouth. Even so, the points he made were hard to argue with. Evar knew in his gut that the library was not an act of violence. He knew it was well intentioned and a force for good. But the words to make that clear, to persuade others of the choice his heart had already made…they were proving hard to find.

“We need to find Livira. And Arpix. And the others.” Evar realised that the circle of people he cared for had been steadily growing. He felt a duty to Salamonda whom he had come to like despite the language barrier. He was concerned for Livira’s friend Neera, and not entirely because of the hurt it would do to Livira if she were to come to harm. “We don’t need to be…wherever here is.”

“We still need Mayland to get us out.” Clovis didn’t sound as if she was disagreeing with the rescuing-Arpix bit. “So, we’d better stay put. How are you feeling? That wound looks…odd.”

“It feels odd.” Evar glanced down at it again. “But it beats bleeding. I feel…” He certainly didn’t feel like he’d been knocking at death’s door. “Ready.”

A glimmer caught his eye. The gleam of something that wasn’t endless pages. A ring? A gold ring. Evar bent to pick it up. The metal felt cold in his hand, heavier than it should have been.

“Mayland told us not to pick anything up,” Starval said.

---